We went on a road trip today and it was a lot of fun. We left home base about 9:30 and our first stop was at a road side pull out that was a cairn to someone, not sure who but this gives you an idea of the landscape we saw.  

    I was driving so I did not get many scenery pictures but all of those mountain were spectacular.  It was cloudy and overcast when we left but turned into on of the nicest days this month. We were on our way to the Glambaer old turf house.  http://www.glaumbaer.is/is/information/glaumbaer-farm/glaumbaer-english-1. 

It is a pretty amazing place. I can’t remember being in turf house and this one was obviously built for a well to do family as it had 9 rooms in the main house and 4 or 5 out buildings.  This is the front of the houses and outbuildings.  

 The building in the middle is the entrance to the house and it does not look like anything from the front but take a look at a side view of the house. 

 All of the backs of the sod huts you see on the left are part of the house.  There were guest rooms, kitchens, pantries, dairy and at the very back of the house was a large bedroom where all of the family and the workers slept.  If you go to the link it shows an excellent diagram of all of the rooms.

We went on to the town of Skagafjorour where they have a fish tannery, they also tan sheep hides and seal, etc.  The fish leather comes in the most delicious colours you have ever seen, I had to buy a couple and then we found the seconds bin and I really had to buy a lot of fish leather. I am going to try it out in my felting, the bright colours and the texture should make some intersting combinations if it stands up to the felting process which I think it should as I know they use some pretty wicked chemicals in the tanning.  I think it is the only tannery that works with fish skins which would normally be discarded.  This is their website, it was so mich fun to go there.

http://www.atlanticleather.is/index.php/en/#!copy_of__mg_3766

The reason behind our trip was to go to Skagastrond, our neighbouring town, that also has an artist residency NES.  We arrived their in the early afternoon and introduced ourselves to all of the artists who were there, 7 of them, there are 14 artists in total.  They work in an old fish processing plant in a large open area each artist having their own work table and some shelving.  They have a small kitchen and are housed in 4 shared apartments around town. very different from our wake up in the morning and walk down the hall to the studio.  I don’t think that kind of a residency is for me but it was fun to see what folks were working on.  Some small watercolours, some larger paintings, some videos and some photography.  There have been 4 artists from NES to visit us this month, one of them from Austria asked us to help her on an outdoor project she was working on braiding some grass.  Off we went to braid grass, this is what it looks like so far. 

 The braided grass are the pieces with their tails in the air.  It was fun, not sure I will be doing it anytime soon.  The Austrian lady wanted to get some Icelandic girls with their light hair to lay down beside the braided grass so that it looks like their hair and the grass merge and she will photograph them.

A really great day and I am tired now but I did have time this morning to cut up my slowly 3D sculpture.  Ta da
 It is my new favourite piece, thanks for reading. 

i was in the studio early this morning and left for the day about 1/2 an hour ago so you would think I should have lots to show you but that does not seem to be the case.  I started the morning by cutting into this little guy from yesterday.

 I could not get a very good picture of the piece, please take my word for it that it is more interesting than it appears here.  I definitely want to get another one of these done, but bigger, before next Thirsday.  I did take a few minutes and write up all of the pieces I want to complete by the open house and put the approximate times for each.  So far I am at 43 hours of work and that is without doing any deviations so I guess instead of writing blog posts I should be felting. And even worse Amanda and I are taking tomorrow off and going on a road trip. 

A local guy rents cars and he dropped the car off tonight so we are ready to go tomorrow morning. We are going to see a sod hut museum, the store where they sell the tanned fish and then to the adjoining town where they have an artist residency but have lots more people and many types of artists working there. Amanada does not drive so I will be the driver and she will be the navigator. No place that we are going is very far but that does not account for the ups and downs and mountains that are all over the place. It should be a fun day.

I also made a 3D small corded sculpture but it is drying and probably will not be revealed for a couple of days and I made this. 

  It is about 15″ x 12″ and represents some dead coral on the bottom of the ocean. How boring you might say. but wait until you do this to it.

  See what a good backdrop it makes and adds height to some of my work.  On the plan there is at least one more of these but we shall see how the plan goes. 

So that’s it for today.  I went water jogging late this afternoon and it was nice but there was a brisk wind and that makes it coool walking from the shower to the outside pool and from the pool to the hot pool. But I survived to complete two more hollow coral tubes, they are drying, I will get them attached in the next day or so.  I know I said I was going to make 6 a day to get them finished but it was just too much fun and fairly easy to make the rock and the corded sculpture. 

My plan is to be back in time to tell you about our road trip tomorrow night but we shall see. Maybe some Vikings will attack us along the way.  

Thanks for reading.

Johanna, the Textile Centre’s director, came to visit Amanada and I today to show us a shawl she knit that was now blocked, we saw the shawl unblocked on Satirday when we were at her farm.  When she saw my work, that is now more artfully displayed and Amanada’s weaving she wanted us to have an open house.  Isn’t that exciting, I will get to show my work in Iceland!  We decided next Thursday after work and Johanna will put a notice in the paper that everyone in town gets.  It will be wonderful to show my work and explain it to people here and to see what they think of it. 

Now on to the business of making those creatures and things.  On Tuesday I felted a marble piece that had to dry overnight, this morning I cut the marbles out and this is the finished product.

  
As I was cutting the marbles out of it I got to thinking that I should be able to make a piece that stood up and had these great holes in it .  I made a test piece to see if I could make my hands do want my head was seeing.  I laid out Icelandic wool in four layers with three secions of colour and it looked like this.

  
The picture probably makes my words make more sense.  There ar 9 different colours of wool there plus the red across the top.  I wet it out and it looked like this.

  
The piece measured 15 x 11.  I rolled it a bit to the prefelt stage and left it to dry. After it was completely dry I started adding marbles leaving about 3 ” on the bottom so it would have “la leg to stand on”.  This is what it looked like after adding the marbles, it now measures 8″ x 8″.

  
 I stitched it together so it was round and started felting it. It took quite a while but finally it was good and felted, I rinsed it and left it to dry, I was hoping I would be able to cut the marbles out tonight but the piece is still damp so you will have to wait until tomorrow, as will I, to see how it turned out but so far so good.   I can see making a piece that is larger as this looks like it should be another intersting piece.

I did make 6 more hollow tubes for the coral, proof of completion. 

  
I think I will need 8 more so I will try and get them done tomorrow but I have lots more fun projects that I want to complete.  I got the silk tea dyed and I have set it up under the growing sea world.  I think it looks pretty good and one day soon you will also get to see it.

That was my day, thanks for reading.

i cut into my corded sculpture this morning and I really like it.  Take a look for yourself.

 

Isn’t it great?  I so love these corded pieces when they work out like this one did. There is just something about them that makes me very happy. So that was a great start to my day.  

Still on the list on my wall were marble pieces so I decided to do another one but a bit bigger.  I got the piece wet out and rolled to the prefelt stage, let it dry over lunch hour then added the marbles after lunch and started the felting process. Felting these prices takes a long time because you can’t roll them easily so a lot of rubbing by hand and throwing but in a couple of hours I had if felted to my satisfaction and it is now drying on the radiator overnight.  This is what the piece looks like now before I cut all the marbles out in the morning.

  
It is kind of pretty now but it will be much more intersting when I have liberated those marbles.

Also on the list were more hollow coral, I wanted them to be in orange but I have no orange in Icelandic wool so about two weeks ago I carded some red and yellow together to make an orange.  I made the flat piece of felt that the hollow tubes are attached to but not until today did I make any tubes.  I was able to get 6 tubes out of what I carded and after they dried I attached them.  This piece will be another favourite when done.

  
It needs at least a dozen more tubes and they are boring to make but I have set myself a goal of 6 a day until done and I did card up this pile of orange after supper so I am ready to felt tubes tomorrow.

  
Another good day, I went water jogging this afternoon and just as I was finished the mums and tots water class was starting with about a dozen mums and one dad and even more kids so it was time to get out of the pool. Note to self, go earlier or later on Tuesdays.  

We started with a brilliantly sunny day but the clouds rolled in mid afternoon and have stayed, the wind is coming from inland so not as cool as the ocean breeze but still not a real warm day. But it was a good day to be felting.  Thanks for reading.

There were more successes than learning experiences today so I am pleased.  This is the 3D sculpture that was a work in progress last evening and is now drying on a radiator.

  
I am very, very pleased with it, when it is dry I will pull out all of the threads and start to cut into it to reveal the colours hidden within. I can hardly wait, another piece off my list.

I then decided to try using two resists one inside the other.  I had to put my thinking cap on to make sure it was going to attach correctly and by that I mean that the two pieces are felted together. I made this one with Icelandic, the 3D one is made of merino and the cords are made from short fiber merino.  The Icelandic makes these type of pieces very well and I like how this turned out.  I learned how to do this at a class I took last year with Marjolein Dallinga at Series at Red Deer College where we had to make our “inner selves”. I don’t think this is a repeat but I like the idea of a piece inside a piece. 

  
The blue bit is attached inside and it stands on its own, so a good success.

A few days ago I was wondering what I could use for a sand coloured background for my pieces to sit on. The obvious thing would be to felt some pieces but that would take a lot of time and it is way more fun to felt pieces like the one above than to make flat piece of felt followed by another flat piece of felt, I think you get the picture.  I did bring silk and chiffon and someone left some inexpensive black tea so I thought I would try tea dying.  I took a piece of each fabric, left it for 15 minutes and that seemed a bit light so left them for 15 more minutes and this is the result.

  
I think they work well together, the chiffon took the dye a little more but on its own the chiffon has little colour but when teamed with the silk it works.  I will dye some bigger pieces and probably leave them for even longer but I am quite pleased that my sand wil not take much work at all.  Some of the pieces on the sand.

  
At the end of the day I wanted to try to make a shell so I looked the small shell I had over and tried to figure out how to make the resists work and as you can see I still need to do a lot of tweaking to say I can make a shell.

  
The felted piece on the left looks nothing like the shell on the right.  I have changed the shape of the resist to better reflect the shells shape and figured out another way to get the second resist out and I will give it a go tomorrow morning.

All in all a good day with some learning.  Thanks for reading.

if yesterday was sheep day then today was culture day.  The Textile Musem is right next door to the school, here is the museum from my studio window.

 There is a sod roof and it is a lovely building.  The original museum opened in 1971 and was housed in the two small building that are closest to the school.  The new building opened in 2003, this is their web site:

http://www.simnet.is/textile/index_e.htm

It has absolutley exquisite hand made items that are works of art, from knitting to weaving to hardanger to bobbin lace, etc., etc.  You can touch the pieces if you wear gloves and with so much eye candy it was difficult to know where to look.  The museum was open today, it does not open for the season until June 1st, because today was museums day across Iceland.  They had music at the open day, two musicians from the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, a woman on violin and a man on xylophone and lots of other interesting things that made sound. They did about 6 or 7 songs with him playing the xylophone and her on violin, she was talking about the songs but as it was all in Icelandic it was hard to get the gist.  For the last part of their performance she told nursery rhymes, some so old that folks I talked with after said they had never heard them.  He made music on rocks set up like a xylophone, an odd little keyboard that he blew into while he played it, crinkled up plastic wrap, saw blades from three circular saws struck and they sounded like church bells and on and on.  The last part was much more intersting to me as you did not need to know the language to understand some of the actions. There were quite a few people in the museum so we can go back next week when they are setting up a new exhibit and take our time looking at all of the wonderful works of art. 

They have some old equipment on display and this commercial spinning machine that was cranked by hand struck my fancy.

   
 

Pretty intersting old piece of machinery that looks like it would probably still work today.

But hard to get a lot of work done if you are out on the town, I did get all of the components finished for a 3D sculpture and it is going to be much better than the last one, I can tell by how the colours are already starting to blend at the prefelt stage.  I made 5 cords and did the piece they will be put into, here it is laid out ready for the next stage.

  The cords will be sewn into channels and then the felting will begin.  By this time tomorrow night it will be drying and on Tuesday morning I should be able to cut into it.
So not lots to show for a day’s work, we had two different groups threw today so I did some talking about felting if that counts.  Thanks for reading.

Today Amanda and I got a break from our studios, Johanna, the Textile Centres director, took us to her farm. They have 230 Icelandic sheep, mostly ewes and this is the time of year that they have their babies. The sheep are kept inside to have their lambs, what cute little lambs they are. We saw lots of small lambs, some right after they were born and watched Johanna pull a lamb out of her mum, she was the second lamb and was turned around and would not come out. So here are a few pictures from today’s fun, no pictures of lambs being born in case you were concerned.

   
     The ewes are in large pens but once they give birth the mother and babies are moved into a separate pen to get to know each other. Once they get a bit bigger and stronger they are moved to a fenced area close to the barn and then when they really get big they get the run of the farm. Come the end of June these sheep and sheep from many other farms are trucked to the high country, about an hour and a half from Blonduos where they spend the summer foraging for themselves. At the end of the summer there is a big roundup when all the sheep are sorted, you can’t seem them but all the ewes have ear tags and the lambs will as well to make figuring out which sheep belong to whom relitively simple.

Johanna then feed us wonderful treats and we talked out all sorts of things and got to hear about some of the past projects that have been completed while folks were at the Textile Centre.  Then it was back to the studio to see if I could complete what I stated this morning.  These starfish had both been laid out last night and did not take too long to finish.  The first one is a ruffled starfish.

  
I like him, when I was laying him out last night his colours reminded me of the A& W root bear.  This next starfish has morphed into more of a sea creature thingy.

  
I used marbles to make the holes but they seemed to pull him out of shape but I thing every Under the Sea tableau needs a sea creature thingy.

I made another medium sized starfish, a small brain coral, a purple coral and a small shell.

   
   

A good day of felting and hanging around with sheep, what could be better.

Thanks for reading.

Another great day in the studio.  I made a list about 10 days ago of what I wanted to make for Under the Sea II and while I have been whittling away at the edges of the list I have not been making any real effort to knock some items off of the list. Today was the day to knock off starfish. My list said 7 starfish were needed. Way back when I first got here I made two starfish using Icelandic wool and they have sat with the rest of the pieces I made but I was never iin love with them, actually I don’t even like them that much. They just seem too big and clunky so I decided to start making starfish with merino and while I don’t have 7 finished I do have 5.

   
Aren’t they the cutest starfish!  The small ones are really small, the idea being that I can scatter these starfish around the coral reef and they won’t look all matchy size wise. Numbers 6 and 7 are started. I am going to use the marble technique on one of them and the other is going to have “lines” in it.  They should both be done in the morning. 

I had a visitor this morning, Erla who works in the office downstairs brough in her 5 year old daughter Anita and she came to visit me and help me felt.  I gave her the piece she helped me felt, it was a small brain coral so I will have to make another.  Anita drew me a picture of her house so I hung it on my design wall. Erla runs a bed and breakfast about 20 kms from Blonduos. She said they had 4 rooms last year but have expanded to 8 rooms, last summer they were full most of the time with foreign visitors. Erla works here about half time, she was my contact when I was asking questions about the residency. 

I did go water jogging today and maybe that is why I am dragging my butt this evening. I had to stop in the grocery store on the way back from the pool and I attempted to take a picture of the back wall of yarn. It was very difficult as there are lots of other goods for sale around the yarn wall but maybe you can get the idea from these photos. The wall is about 25 or 30 feet long and is quite impressive.

   
   

I am sure you get the idea, knitters heaven. 

That’s it for today, thanks for reading.  

I bet that the majority of my readers and I include myself in this group, did not know that Ascension Day is a national holiday in Iceland.  Ascension Day is 42 days after Jesus was crucified and ascended into heaven. No one told me that was today, Amanda went to the pool as usual to find it was closed and no one was coming to work downstairs so I googled Iceland’s holidays and that was when I learned what today is. Icelanders also get a holiday for WhitMonday which is on May 25th and ithat is 7 weeks since Eater.  Icelanders have a total of 12.5 national holidays per year, they only get 1/2 a day off on December 24th. But now we know that a week Monday is another holiday we will be prepared and Amanda will not go to the pool that morning. It will be interesting to see how many people are at work tomorrow or if many take a vacation day so they can have a 4 day weekend.  Fortunately the grocery store was open so we could get more supplies.

On to the important information in the blog, felting!  I had a wonderful day in the studio, I finished the sea anemone and it looks great, look for yourselves.

It it is made up of 6 separate pieces put inside each other, they were made progressively smaller.  I am real pleased with how it turned out. It took all morning to finish but the result were worth the work. I will probably make another one but start with a smaller outside piece as this one feels a bit clunky.

I don’t think I have shown you a picture of my studio.  When I arrived the Icelandic wool that I ordered from Alafoss had been dropped off here and when I brought it to the studio I dumped it on two of the tables and as I am not sharing the studio with anyone I have just left it there. It is wonderful to come into the studio and have all of that coloured wool greet you.

Isn’t it wonderful, I have certainly used some but I have an awful lot more to use and I don’t think I have enough days here to use all of it. It was fairly inexpensive but that was without shipping.

I did get one more silk hankie coral completed, this time I chose grey roving as the background and then I lined the three of them up so you could see the difference.

That was my day, nothing done this evening, still fighting with my cold but slowly getting better.

Thanks for reading.